There were 15 winners this time because one submission had 9 collaborators listed.
This smelled fishy, so Akane and I decided on the following:
Happy Zeepkisting!!!
Zeepkist
Zeepkist Awesome Alpha - Version 15, Patch 69
There were 15 winners this time because one submission had 9 collaborators listed.
This smelled fishy, so Akane and I decided on the following:
Happy Zeepkisting!!!
The Road to v16 - Zeepkist Devlog Part 3
Zeepkist Devlog
Hey everyone!!
If you've been following along on the Discord you may have been keeping track of some recent developments!
You may also have read the previous devlog and been waiting for more!
Well, I've been cooking this one for a while now! It's time for devlog 3!!
Monorails
The keen observer might have noticed something, once or twice, in the background of Zeepkist's main menu.
Look at the very top of the image, behind the glass:
I've always been fairly secretive about the whole affair. It's been something I prototyped long ago and since then never had the time to actually implement.
Here's what it looks like in the Unity Editor:
For v16, I figured it was time to add this for real :)
IT'S MONORAIL TIME
Monorails!
The ideal form of public transport!! Tried and tested in real life, their swag outperforms trains, their grace makes them preferable to airplanes, and their passenger-carrying capacity makes them an obvious winner over automobiles.
Zeepkist could not do without, of course.
Monorails
Monorails come with dedicated monorail station blocks, which allow for easy access to player-enterable monorail cars.
Upon entering monorail cars, players can brake and a little anchor icon will display in the bottom of the screen. The anchor icon means that the player's Zeepkist is connected to the monorail car beneath it.
This mechanic makes it possible for players to hop onto monorails, connect, and go through curves and over hills without any fear of falling off!
I've also decided to retrofit this new mechanic to sleds, which were a perfect candidate for this "connection" mechanic! No more falling out of sleds for you folks!! :D
Tunnels
Next, I wanted to make sure that the new monorails meshed well with already existing Zeepkist blocks, so I made sure the following was possible:
Monorails can use bobsleigh tubes as tunnels!
Special Blocks
Monorails also come with a couple of special blocks!
There's a "horn" block which lets the monorail toot its horn.
And a buffer stop which will, naturally, not allow the monorail to continue.
Bankings
Monorails also come with a couple of banked blocks!
These are especially useful for making it easier to dismount monorails. Zeepkists will easily roll off of tilted monorails!
On top of which, banked monorails are extremely radical to ride on!
Insanity
Finally, monorails can go up and down!
And they can go further up!
...and down! Really, you can do whatever you want with monorails!!
One Warning
However! And I cannot stress this enough! All of these monorails are 100% physics based. They are not following any invisible splines or whatever. They exist in your level as rigidbodies with colliders, some forces applied, and nothing more!
⚠️ This means they can derail! ⚠️
They can even derail on perfectly regular looking track pieces, if you set their speed too high!!
⚠️ Their default speed, 100, works very smooth and stable, and should not cause any problems under regular use.
⚠️ However if you feel like fiddling with their speed values and decide to send them through too tight corners, they will absolutely derail in any manner of unpredictable ways.
⚠️ And even then, Unity's physics aren't perfect, so even completely fine monorails might sometimes decide to break and derail!
⚠️ So be careful of that!! :D ⚠️
The End
That's it for this devlog!! I hope you enjoyed the little behind-the-scenes insight and I hope all of you are as excited for Zeepkist Version 16 as I am!!
If you want to be even more up to date on Zeepkist development, you can join the Discord!
Happy Zeepkisting!!
CHOO CHOO
Level Contest - Wall Riding
THEME: Wall Riding
Build a level that has players racing primarily on the wall ride blocks
Looking for ideas? How about a track that: sends you round spirals, through intersecting loops, sloped switchbacks, or racing on the side of buildings!
DEADLINE
- Your track should be complete and submitted by Sunday, 14th January 2024 at 18:00 GMT
- Submissions will be combined into a single workshop item after the deadline above
SUBMISSION RULES
- You can only submit one level (you can modify or replace your submission as much as you like until the deadline)
- Level collaborations are permitted (Maximum of 3 players per level. This counts as a level submission for each individual creator)
- The name of the level MUST start with "ZSL - " (e.g "ZSL - My Level")
LEVEL RULES
- Scaling track pieces is permitted
- Level MUST follow any theme requirements set above
- Level MUST be under 4000 blocks
- Level MUST have an author time above 30 seconds
- Level MUST have an author time under 1 minute 15 seconds (75s)
- Level MUST have at least 2 checkpoints. Consider adding additional checkpoints for split timing or where it would prevent a cut, as cuts do not make for good tournament tracks!
- Level MUST NOT have hidden finishes/shortcuts (e.g using no-collision or invisible blocks to hide a secret path that is NOT the intended route)
- Level MUST NOT have alternative "risky" finishes
HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR LEVEL
- Join our Official Discord server
- Upload the level to the Steam Workshop
- Link the workshop item in the theme's thread in #level-submissions
Don't have Discord? You can submit your entry by linking your workshop item in the comments section of this announcement post!
WINNERS & PRIZES
- Up to 15 of the submitted levels will be used for the next Zeepkist Super League event
- The community will vote on their favourite maps from the theme once submissions close
- Top 3 in the community votes for Best Decor and Best Track Layout will each win a special hard hat cosmetic in-game. Discord users will also get a `Level Contest Winner` role and 3,000 chat EXP in our Discord server.
BANNER CONTEST
We're also hosting a themed banner contest for our discord server banner image where you can win a special beret hat!!
The theme is Chinese New Year to celebrate the Year of the Dragon and ends at the same time as this level contest!! View the banner contest event details on Discord
- Akane
Zeepkist Awesome Alpha - Version 15, Patch 68
The Road to v16 - Zeepkist Devlog Part 2
Zeepkist Devlog
Hey everyone!!
If you've been following along on the Discord you may have been keeping track of some recent developments!
You may also have read the previous devlog and been waiting for more!
Well, wait no longer! Devlog part 2 is here!! :D
Fixing S-Bends
SO, for the longest time, Zeepkist had a teeny tiny little very annoying issue with its S-Bends.
...They didn't fit together.
The roads (pink) would fit together with the terrain pieces (checkerboard pattern on the side), but there was an issue:
S-Bend road would leave a gap, and S-Bend terrain pieces would overlap and cause Z-Fighting.
And in a game where the entire level editor is based on blocks that fit together, blocks not actually fitting together is really annoying.
So for v16 I'm fixing that!
The issue is that when I made these S-Bends, I didn't consider aligning them to a "perfect" S-Bend. In the picture below you can see the perfect S-Bend as the orange line, with the track piece being the black wireframe.
Luckily, the fix is generally pretty easy. Just recreate the pieces but this time using the perfect S-Bend as a guide!
...All 26 different pieces of them...
...And then making the 3 and 4 block long versions... :D
Once that was done I could verify in Blender that they indeed fit with the S-Bend template AND with each other!
Then all I had to do was verify if they also fit together in Zeepkist, and yes!
Roads fit together side by side!
And so do the terrain pieces!!
Finally, S-Bend pieces make sense :)
But that's not all!
Seeing as I was working on S-Bends anyway, I figured I'd make a couple of new ones that I'd been missing in Zeepkist so far.
MORE S-Bends!!
First up we have these split S-Bends. We had a split-S bend before, as part of the "covered glass roads" track pieces, but that one was tilted at an angle and only had one special barrier type. Now we get 3 flat S-Bends in the regular road style :)
Next we have half S-Bends!
I can imagine these will be extremely useful for example when transferring from flat road to halfpipes.
And finally we have sloped half S-Bends! :D
And that's about it for today's devlog!!
The End
That's it for this devlog!! I hope you enjoyed the little behind-the-scenes insight and I hope all of you are as excited for Zeepkist Version 16 as I am!!
If you want to be even more up to date on Zeepkist development, you can join the Discord!
Happy Zeepkisting!!
PS: Here's a sneak peek to a future devlog: 👀
Zeepkist is part of the Yogscast's Jingle Jam 2023!!!
HEY GAMERS
I've been excitedly waiting for a while to announce this, and the time is finally here!
Zeepkist is part of the Yogscast's Jingle Jam 2023!!!
Woohoo!!!
Here's the Yogscast playing Zeepkist on their channel:
And here's a link to the Jingle Jam 2023 website:
https://www.jinglejam.co.uk/
Jingle Jam will run from December 1st to December 14th, raising money for 12 incredible charities.
Happy Zeepkisting everyone!!
Zeepkist Super League - Monochromatic
Vote for the Level Contest Winners!
Voting is open for the Monochromatic level contest held earlier this month! Voting closes on 10th December.
Vote for up to 3 submissions in the Best Decor and Best Layout/Flow categories!
VOTE NOW
When is the Super League tournament?
Timeslot 1 (1 Room, 64 player capacity)
- Sunday 3rd December at 10:00 PST
- Sunday 3rd December at 13:00 EST
- Sunday 3rd December at 18:00 GMT
- Sunday 3rd December at 19:00 CET
- Monday 4th December at 05:00 AEDT
Timeslot 2 (1 Room, 64 player capacity)
- Sunday 3rd December at 19:00 PST
- Sunday 3rd December at 22:00 EST
- Monday 4th December at 03:00 GMT
- Monday 4th December at 04:00 CET
- Monday 4th December at 14:00 AEDT
Super League Details
We will be competing on 15 of the 50 level submissions from the Monochromatic level contest held earlier this month. You can checkout all submissions on the Steam Workshop!
The rooms will open around 10 minutes before the event starts and is scheduled to last around 2 hours (7 minutes per level) with a rest period half way through. The first timed level will begin on the hour (~10 minutes after rooms open)
The leaderboards in all rooms will be tracked and will be combined into a single overall leaderboard post-event on zeepki.st/super-league!
Top 3 with the most points will receive a NEW special racing helmet IN-GAME, a Discord role and 3,000 chat EXP in our Discord server!
Who can join?
The Super League is open to all! Open Zeepkist and hop in to one of the Super League rooms hosted by Akane (Timeslot 1) or Kernkob (Timeslot 2). Rooms are filled on a first-come-first-served basis.
Look out for the following rooms hosted by either Akane or Kernkob:
- Zeepkist Super League: Monochromatic
What tracks are we racing on?
The 15 tracks we're racing on have been picked out by our judges. Download the level playlist here.
They are:
- Shattered City by Lexer
- Citro by Khord
- Lotus by The Maou
- Blackout by Lazy_Echidna
- Scrap Stadium by reholmes92
- Sunset Grove by icRS
- Purple Plummet by Dylan
- [BREAK TIME: MONOCHROMATIC EDITION]
- Unearthly Formation by Shadynook
- MONOCHROME by Istaysideway
- Permafrost by justMaki
- Quack! by St Nicholas
- Alizarin by Linzi
- Colorless by OgelGames
- Forgotten Citadels by Kernkob + Socks242 + Odist + Hydro + Not That Guy + Greil + TheBestMaidens + AndMe + Aceiys
- Orange Chocolate Cake by jandje
- Akane
Level Contest - Snow Rally
THEME: Snow Rally
Rally is back! Build a level that has players racing through a snow rally stage!!
Use of snow textures on the racing surface is NOT required.
Looking for ideas? How a track that: twistings through a muddy snow-covered forest; takes place on or next to a frozen lake; through a snowy village/town; or recreate a real-life rally stage (Monte-Carlo/Sweden etc)!
DEADLINE
- Your track should be complete and submitted by Sunday, 17th December 2023 at 18:00 GMT
- Submissions will be combined into a single workshop item after the deadline above
SUBMISSION RULES
- You can only submit one level (you can modify or replace your submission as much as you like until the deadline)
- Level collaborations are permitted (this counts as a level submission for each individual creator)
- The name of the level MUST start with "ZSL - " (e.g "ZSL - My Level")
LEVEL RULES
- Scaling track pieces is permitted
- Level MUST follow any theme requirements set above
- Level MUST be under 4000 blocks
- Level MUST have an author time above 30 seconds
- Level MUST have an author time under 1 minute 15 seconds (75s)
- Level MUST have at least 2 checkpoints. Consider adding additional checkpoints for split timing or where it would prevent a cut, as cuts do not make for good tournament tracks!
- Level MUST NOT have hidden finishes/shortcuts (e.g using no-collision or invisible blocks to hide a secret path that is NOT the intended route)
- Level MUST NOT have alternative "risky" finishes
HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR LEVEL
- Join our Official Discord server
- Upload the level to the Steam Workshop
- Link the workshop item in the theme's thread in #level-submissions
Don't have Discord? You can submit your entry by linking your workshop item in the comments section of this announcement post!
WINNERS & PRIZES
- Up to 15 of the submitted levels will be used for the next Zeepkist Super League event
- The community will vote on their favourite maps from the theme once submissions close
- Top 3 in the community votes for Best Decor and Best Track Layout will each win a special hard hat cosmetic in-game. Discord users will also get a `Level Contest Winner` role and 3,000 chat EXP in our Discord server.
BANNER CONTEST
We're also hosting a themed banner contest for our discord server banner image where you can win a special beret hat!!
The theme is Snow Rally and ends at the same time as this level contest!! View the banner contest event details on Discord
- Akane
Zeepkist Awesome Alpha - Version 15, Patch 67
The Road to v16 - Zeepkist Devlog Part 1
Zeepkist Devlog
Hey everyone!!
If you've been following along on the Discord you may have been keeping track of some recent developments!
You might also have noticed some small updates recently containing mostly bugfixes, a lot of which are actually things I fixed for the next update but decided to already make available right now because they're so helpful!
So I thought it might be fun to make a series of news post development logs to keep everyone up-to-date on what I'm working on!
Namely, I'm working on:
Zeepkist Version 16
If you've been keeping track of Zeepkist's version numbering you might realize we're currently still on Version 15, but Patch 66. That's quite a large patch number!
For a small history on Version 15, here's a couple of relatively big changes it contained:
- v15p0: Ctrl-Z
- v15p8: Purple neon & more block primitives
- v15p10: Fog + Glass Fixed
- v15p16: New spectator camera modes
- v15p25: Feather Forcefields
- v15p34: Server Update
- v15p35: More Server Update
- v15p36: More More Server Update
- v15p38: The Soap Update
- v15p55: Faster Startup Loading
All that while I'd been planning the Zeepkist v16 update, constantly just-not-getting-to-it. But now that's about to change!
Zeepkist v16 will be a big update, and I intend for it to lift Zeepkist out of "Alpha" and into "Beta". I'm planning to bump up the price of Zeepkist as well, seeing as Zeepkist today is a very very different game than it was back when Zeepkist v1 first launched.
So, time for the devlog! The first part will be about FMOD.
FMOD
There's one big thing that makes Zeepkist still feel a little bit "in-development", and it's the fact that Zeepkist's sound is quite lacking.
There's no music in-game, except from the main menu, there's only a handful of sound effects, and everything combined makes the whole soundscape feel really unfinished. (And Zeepkist by extension).
The why of that is two-part:
- Making sound effects and music is hard
- Actually implementing sound effects was also hard
The first makes sense: Recording clean audio isn't easy, finding the right sounds isn't easy, and making music isn't easy. This doesn't need a lot of explanation, but it's also something that can be overcome with effort, creativity, and a bunch of microphones.
The second one is more complex, and it boils down to one crucial flaw within Unity:
Unity only supports one sound listener.
This means that 3D sound can only be interpreted from one 3D location. Which is fine if you have a game with one local player. However Zeepkist supports 4-player split-screen, which means Zeepkist needs to support 4 different audio listeners.
My solution for this was a wholly custom sound framework that would calculate the distance between sound events and player cameras, and interpolate the sound's volume from that.
It works, but it's completely unscalable.
Every single new sound I added required me to dive into the codebase to manually add API endpoints to my audio system.
What this meant was that any time I had to add a sound, it came with a huge amount of busiwork that really discouraged me from even starting on it. On top of that, I was planning to switch to a better system down the line anyway, so any effort I would put into it would go to waste.
And that's not even to mention complex sound effects such as changing wind volume and pitch based on Zeepkist velocity, which took even more work and tweaking and effort.
With v16, I'm finally upgrading to the better system I'd been planning to switch to all that time.
FMOD!
FMOD is a third party audio framework which completely bypasses Unity's inbuilt system, and comes with a fully-fledged Digital Audio Workstation designed specifically for videogames.
It's used by small indies and big studios alike, and just about everyone I talk about it has nothing but praise for it.
FMOD also includes something they call "parameters", which are values that can be changed from in-game, and changes how the sound framework plays sounds.
For instance, the "wind" sound effect has a parameter called "speed", which is tied to sound volume and pitch all controlled from the comfort of FMOD itself. I don't have to code a single line of code for it, everything happens inside of FMOD and I just need to click and drag some things.
Another thing I love is the "multi-track event" or something like that. What it means is that I can assign multiple audio source files to a single audio event. From Zeepkist I can simply say "Hey FMOD play me a collision!" and then FMOD randomly picks one of the collision sound effects to play for me.
Again, zero programming required. It makes audio work blazingly fast.
It also has a complete mixer-routing system in-place which allows me to assign audio events to specific groups which can have their volumes individually adjusted. Again all from inside FMOD without a line of code in sight.
The only code I type is "FMOD please do X or Y" and the rest happens automatically.
Needless to say this whole thing makes it a LOT easier to add sound effects to Zeepkist, and shifts the entire burden to recording the sound effects themselves. It's basically a 50% decrease in effort at this point, and makes the whole game audio thing a lot nicer to work with.
I'm very excited to be using this a lot more :)
The End
That's it for this devlog!! I hope you enjoyed the little behind-the-scenes insight and I hope all of you are as excited for Zeepkist Version 16 as I am!!
If you want to be even more up to date on Zeepkist development, you can join the Discord!
Happy Zeepkisting!!